Charlie Chaplin Read online

  He himself would of course return in his familiar role as the “little fellow.” His experience with A Woman of Paris had in that sense been a salutary one, and he knew that he could not forsake the Tramp if he wished to retain his popularity. Yet now Charlie would be given a wholly new setting. He would no longer amble along the streets of the city but among the rocks and glaciers of the mountain range. Chaplin also remembered saying to himself that “The next film must be an epic! The greatest!” If the “little fellow” is obliged to fight the great forces of nature, as well as the great human emotions of avarice and despair, he might develop in wholly unexpected ways and thereby create a wholly new kind of comedy. It may also have occurred to him that he might thereby transcend his contemporaries, among them Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The lugubrious mastery of Keaton, and the brash gymnastics of Lloyd, were as much part of silent comedy as Chaplin himself; yet he knew that he had always to stand out.

  He had also to find a suitable heroine, Edna Purviance being now considered unsuitable for the role. He began shooting the film on 8 February 1924, and three weeks later he signed Lillita MacMurray as his new leading lady under the professional name of Lita Grey. The young girl had entered his life four years earlier when she had played the part of “Sin” in the dream sequence of The Kid; it was clear even then that despite, or because of, her youth he was profoundly attracted to her. The difference in time had made her even more desirable. Lita Grey said to the assembled journalists, at the time of signing her contract, that “I have held firm to my ambition to go into pictures, but I felt that I didn’t want to work with anyone except Mr. Chaplin. Patience has its reward.” The studio declared that she was nineteen years old, when in fact she was not quite sixteen.

  The unlucky party of immigrants in the Sierra Nevada had been stranded outside the town of Truckee, and as a result Chaplin decided to use that territory for his location shots. He and the crew, together with Lita Grey and her mother, travelled north by train; since Chaplin did not know precisely how he was going to fashion the story, he needed his young actress there in case of extemporised close-ups. Lita Grey remembered the bitterly cold weather, and the fact that Chaplin caught influenza and was confined to his bed for four days; she also recalled that this was the time when he first made an advance towards her. In her own account he pushed himself upon her, and was only diverted when he believed that he had heard noises outside the bedroom door. He then casually announced to the young girl that “when the time and place are right, we’re going to make love.” He fulfilled his wish some weeks later in the steam-room of his mansion in Beverly Hills. It has often been said that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is in part inspired by the story of Lita Grey.

  At the same time he was engaged in a liaison with Rebecca West, the mistress of H. G. Wells whom he had already met and seduced in England. West later told her sister that he wished to sleep with her “because he had suddenly become terrified of impotence and wanted to see if it were so.” He was later in the year often seen in the company of Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. The gossip columnist of the New York Daily News reported that “Charlie Chaplin continues to pay ardent attention to Marion Davies … There was a lovely young dancer entertaining that evening. And Charlie applauded but with his back turned. He never took his eyes off Marion’s blonde beauty.”

  The film crew of The Gold Rush went back to the studio after a few days in Truckee, but then in April they returned to the ice and snow in order to begin actual shooting in the locations Chaplin had chosen. The set of a mining camp was built, and a pass through the snow created by professional ski-jumpers who carved steps out of the frozen snow on the side of Mount Lincoln; a company of 500 derelicts from Sacramento had been brought by train and, in what became the first scene of the film, in single file they climbed the slope of the frozen waste. It is as momentous a setting as anything in the films of DeMille or Griffith. It seems that Chaplin shot all the external scenes on location but then, remarkably, decided to keep only two of them in the finished film. One of them was the famous opening.

  From May to September 1924 the landscape of The Gold Rush was re-created in the studio, with mountains and glaciers constructed out of hundreds of tons of salt and plaster as well as hundreds of barrels of flour. Here was the mining town in which Charlie falls in love with a dance-hall singer only to be rejected by her. Here was the hut where Charlie and his companion come close to starvation and madness. In these scenes dark circles were painted around the Little Tramp’s eyes to emphasise his plight, making him seem even more like a character out of commedia dell’arte. In the most famous sequence of the film Charlie cooks a boot for himself and his companion as a delicious delicacy in the hour of need, and then eats it as if he were dining at the Ritz. Hunger, the source of many childhood woes, becomes the spring of humour. The boot was in fact made of liquorice and so many “takes” were filmed, with so many different boots, that he and his fellow performer, Mack Swain, became violently ill for some days.

  At the end of September, just as he was completing these scenes, Lita Grey announced that she was pregnant with Chaplin’s child. The members of her family were predictably indignant and, facing charges of sex with a minor that might cost him thirty years’ imprisonment, he was bound to accede to their demands that he marry the girl. He was duplicating his relationship with his previous wife, Mildred Harris, but it may be unwise to speculate about the reasons for this strange re-enactment. There is no reason in passion. Need knows no law. He was sometimes as blind as he was mercurial, and as unyielding as he was unpredictable; he only knew what he wanted, and what he wanted he must have at all costs. His will, and his desire, overcame his judgement.

  It seems that he suggested to Lita that she have an abortion, a proposal which her Catholic mother indignantly rejected. He then suggested that a willing young man be chosen as her husband on payment of a dowry of $20,000. This, too, was turned down. He claimed subsequently that “I was stunned and ready for suicide that day when [Lita] told me that she didn’t love me and that we must marry.” He added that “her mother deliberately and continuously put Lita in my path.” At a much later date he told friends that Lita Grey had said to him, “You’ll marry me. I’ve never gotten a kick out of you, but you’ll marry me!”

  This is the context for the strange story that has itself inspired several books and one film. In November William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies had invited a group of acquaintances on board his yacht, Oneida; among them was a producer, Thomas Ince, and Chaplin himself who was at the time still infatuated with Marion. On the following day Ince left the yacht at San Diego on a stretcher, having apparently suffered a heart attack, and died soon afterwards. The conflicting stories of the party aboard, and the absence of any inquest, aroused suspicions in the notoriously gossipy world of Hollywood. It was soon rumoured that Hearst had shot Ince after catching him with Marion; it was then further supposed that the magnate had shot Ince in the belief that he was in fact Chaplin. From the back, Ince resembled the comedian. The truth will never be found at the bottom of this well, but it is perhaps significant that a week after the incident Chaplin agreed to marry Lita Grey. It may be that the union was designed to reassure Hearst that Chaplin had no further designs upon his mistress.

  The ceremony was to be conducted in the deepest secrecy, and it was agreed that the wedding party would travel by train to Mexico; if anyone was asked the reason for this journey, he or she was to say that Chaplin was investigating new locations for The Gold Rush. Some journalists did follow them, to the town of Guaymas, but Chaplin managed to elude his pursuers by dashing in a car to the home of a local justice of the peace. The ceremony was soon over, and Lita Chaplin recalled later that Chaplin puffed nervously on a cigarette throughout the proceedings; at the conclusion, he made a quick exit to go fishing.

  Chaplin marrying Lita Grey, 1924.

  Courtesy of New York Daily News

  He made it clear that he thought nothing
of the bride, or the bride’s family. He had already called her a “little whore,” and in her first autobiography she records his words to her soon after the ceremony. “The whole point of the ‘little fellow’ is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he’s still a man of dignity. He can still look down on you and your whole bloody bunch of money-hungry scum.” She may not have perfectly recalled the words, but the hatred and bitterness behind them are nevertheless evident.

  On the train back to California he is supposed to have told his companions that “this is better than the penitentiary, but it won’t last.” When they were alone in their compartment, she asked him for water. “Aren’t you,” he asked her, “afraid that I might try to poison you?” He then suggested that she might get some air in the observation car. When she stood on the platform of the car, he came up to her. “This would be a good time to put an end to your misery,” he told her. “Why don’t you jump?” We must rely on Lita Chaplin’s own memory here, but the incident is certainly striking enough to be recalled without effort even many years later. Her account has the ring of authenticity, and it is substantially repeated in her second autobiography. On the newlywed couple’s return to Beverly Hills they were once again met by representatives of the press. Chaplin remarked angrily that “I’ve been trying to avoid this! It’s awful!”

  Lita Chaplin, at the age of sixteen, now found herself the mistress of a large mansion and a body of servants. She was still young enough, however, to be obliged by the school board of Los Angeles to continue her education; so Chaplin hired his wife a tutor. The American humorist Will Rogers commented that “this girl don’t need to go to school. Any girl smart enough to marry Charlie Chaplin should be lecturing at Vassar on ‘taking advantage of your opportunities.’ ”

  With the marriage now behind him, he threw himself into his work on The Gold Rush. With Lita Chaplin soon to become visibly pregnant it was imperative that he find a new leading lady. It was announced that his new bride wished to devote all her time to her wifely duties, and therefore chose to abandon her acting career. No mention was made of her pregnancy. He had, fortunately enough, filmed only a few scenes in which she had appeared and his new choice for the part, Georgia Hale, at the age of nineteen, already had much experience of acting. She recalled his manner as a director. He would “press his lips together, straighten out his arms between his knees and rock back and forth, uttering little baby sounds of coaxing and teasing.”

  She professed later that she was already in love with him, despite having been warned by one of his closest friends, Henry Bergman, to “never fall in love with Chaplin, Georgia. He’s a heartbreaker.” Chaplin told her in these days of filming that “I’ve been thinking too much of you lately, even away from the studio. Do you ever think of me?” She replied that she thought of little else. “That’s all,” he said, “I wanted to hear.” Yet she kept her distance from the married man.

  The woes of his marriage meanwhile became ever larger. Sydney Chaplin tried to console Lita by explaining that his younger brother’s “instincts are good. It’s just that he doesn’t understand himself very well.” She later revealed that he “was a human sex machine” who could make love six times a night without noticeable fatigue; he was a strenuous lover without necessarily being a good one. His vigour, however, led her to suspect that he committed adultery whenever he found the opportunity to do so.

  A son was born to the Chaplins at the beginning of May 1925; since it was only six months after the wedding it was deemed advisable to keep mother and baby away from the prying eyes of the press. They were despatched to a cabin in the San Bernadino Mountains, and then to a house at Redondo Beach in Los Angeles County. The doctor who attended was bribed to falsify the date on the birth certificate, so that “Charles Chaplin” was registered as entering the world on 28 June. It could at least then be considered a premature birth. Chaplin had at first resisted the baptismal name, on the grounds that a famous name would prove a handicap to his son; Chaplin junior himself believed that as a consequence of his father’s “tremendous ego” he did not want two Charlie Chaplins in the family. He never held the baby in his arms.

  By the beginning of July he had completed the editing and cutting of The Gold Rush. The film had taken seventeen months to complete, with 170 days of actual filming. At a cost of a little under $1 million it was the most expensive comedy of the silent era but, with earnings of $6 million, it was eventually the most successful.

  At the end of the month he travelled to New York for the premiere. Just before the opening he became the first actor to be placed on the front cover of Time, but that was just the beginning of the adulation. The Gold Rush opened at the Strand Theatre on 16 August and, in My Autobiography, he recalled how the audience began yelling and applauding as soon as he appeared on the screen; the “little fellow” blithely steps around a precipice with a bear apparently in pursuit of him. It was the perfect combination of comedy and terror. It also conveys one of the principles of Chaplin’s comedy. Laughter relieves the mental strain of the dread we feel for Charlie in the world.

  The image of the Little Tramp was now fixed forever in the public imagination. His yearnings are now as palpable as his bowler hat and cane; he needs food, money and love in that order. In this sense his fate is inseparable from that of common humanity. In The Gold Rush, and the films that follow, his role combines pathos and dignity together with an unbreakable strength of spirit. He holds himself upright before the camera, sometimes with almost military severity. The single most published photograph of Chaplin’s career is that of the Little Tramp in the snowbound cabin, shivering and hungry, looking directly at the spectator with an expression both melancholy and steadfast. When Chaplin eventually released the film, with a narrative spoken by himself, he always referred to him impersonally as “the poor little fellow.”

  The film was an immediate, and then an enduring, success. It has always been the most popular of his films, and is generally regarded as the most coherent and the best constructed. He himself said many times that “this is the picture I want to be remembered by.” One reviewer noted that Chaplin, in his role as the Little Tramp, had “the unique ability to enlarge himself. We cannot see the end of him. When we make his acquaintance we go on a journey which may be long, but is not exhausting, and has a great variety of views. Such men are rare.”

  After the celebrations were over he returned to his hotel suite where he collapsed. It seems to have been a case of nervous exhaustion. The doctor recommended that he leave New York immediately, and he took the train to Brighton Beach. He wrote later that, on the way, “I wept for no reason.” He checked into a hotel beside the ocean but, as he sat at the window inhaling deep draughts of air, a crowd gathered to cheer him. He retreated into his room. When eventually he returned to New York, he remained in the city for the next two months without much apparent consideration for his wife and newborn child.

  He indulged himself here in the exploitation of his fame, no less with bohemians and intellectuals than with women and society hostesses. He took a suite at the Ambassador Hotel and began an affair with a young actress, Louise Brooks, who described him as “the most bafflingly complex man who ever lived.” He had a fear of contracting venereal disease, naturally enough, and Brooks confided to her biographer that “he had studied the matter and was firmly convinced that iodine was a reliable VD preventative. Normally he employed only a small local application but one night … he was inspired to paint the sum of his private parts with iodine and come running with a bright red erection” towards the squealing Louise Brooks and a female companion.

  He returned to his round of restaurants and cocktail parties, soirées and visits to the theatre. He was surrounded by crowds wherever he went. “It isn’t affection,” he told a companion, “it’s egotism. None of these people cared a damn about me. If they did, they wouldn’t embarrass me. They were thinking about themselves, feeling bigger because they
had seen me and could go and brag about it.”

  He entertained his friends and acquaintances in New York with endless stories and imitation. Brooks recalled that he was “doing imitations all the time.” As Isadora Duncan he danced among streams of toilet paper and, as John Barrymore, he picked his nose. He said, one evening, “Look, Louise, guess whom I’m imitating.” It was Louise herself. She learned then that “everything is built on movement.”

  We can capture Chaplin in conversation. Anthony Asquith, the English director, reported that his face became “a spontaneous, improvised dance.” Another acquaintance, Stark Young, said of him that “when you talk with him you sense at the very start an impulse to make the connection between the two of you direct and alive.” Young also made the very perceptive point that “he does not take his colour from me, but from my colour he takes what he needs to express himself to me. He says what he wants me to believe of what he is telling me and, at the same time, I can see that it is what he himself wants to believe of it through me.” His air of frankness and conviction is genuine but “one of its secrets is that it cannot do without you.”

  The philosopher Theodor Adorno believed that “his powerful, explosive and quick-witted agility recalls a predator ready to pounce.” He noted that “he acts incessantly … Any time spent with him is an uninterrupted performance. One scarcely dares speak to him, not from awe of his fame … but rather from fear of disturbing the spell of the performance.”

  He liked nothing so much as impersonation so powerful that it seemed more vivid and intense than the real thing. Asquith remarked that “it was not a question of mimicry or verbal description, it was an act of creation. He himself disappeared, leaving a kind of ectoplasm from which the people, the setting, the event, materialised.” He could become two housewives gossiping in a Lambeth slum. He could become a famous politician or a notorious criminal. One friend, Robert Payne, remarked that if you gave him a lace handkerchief he would become “an old dowager, a senorita, a Russian noblewoman.” He was the dowager and “brought with her the air she lived in, the whole furniture of her mind, her hobbling walk, the delicate way her fingertips touched the furniture in her room.”